Forging your educational future in legal marketing.

• Author: Hodges, Silvia

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Some would argue that successful law firms have always marketed their services. However, until the late 1980s and early 1990s, the legal sector had limited experience with formalized, planned, comprehensive and strategic marketing. Reading the comments of our association's first 25 presidents, most of us didn't go to college dreaming about a career in legal marketing. We didn't know (or care) that it even existed. Legal marketing sort of happened to us at one point in our careers and then we stayed on because we really liked it. (See the Mar/Apr 2011 issue of Strategies celebrating the LMA's 25th anniversary.)

However, as pioneers, often coming from a career in marketing other professional or financial services or from a legal career, we might wonder where we should go to further educate ourselves in this particular industry. There must be additional things we should learn about when it comes to marketing law firms. So where should we go? To business school? Or law school?

We certainly aren't alone. The lawyers in our firms did not learn about marketing in law school either (apart from the go-getters participating in my course, "Law Firm Marketing," at Fordham Law School, which I taught for the first time this spring semester; and John Boyd's course, "Strategic Business Development," at the University of Denver Law School. In case you are wondering, yes, the courses do fill up right away with eager 2Ls and 3Ls.) Traditionally, however, law schools teach students how to think like lawyers, not how to survive and thrive in a competitive marketplace. Still--some lawyers are intuitively good at marketing their services. But let's be honest--most of them are not born that way and would benefit from some formalized, tried and tested marketing and business development knowledge.

The challenge for the legal sector is that it has undergone greater transformations during the last three decades than in the last two centuries. Deregulation and liberalization, increasing consumer expectations, new information technology, generational differences, as well as a growing global marketplace, have resulted in a significantly changed, increasingly competitive marketplace. Many legal services that were once considered to be highly specialized are being treated more and more like commodities. Technical legal competence alone is insufficient or not a guarantee of success in winning new business or keeping existing clients. Traditional...